Beyond the Opposition, Beyond Chávez?
Venezuela has produced the most unexpected of recent mass social movements. Nine years ago, before the first election of Hugo Chávez Frías, few leftists of the world looked toward Venezuela to lift our sagging spirits. Many Venezuelan radicals say the same, like a communist union leader I met in the industrial city of Valencia: “We don’t know where Chávez came from,” he said, “but he came and changed everything.” By the time a popular uprising in Caracas reversed a U.S.-backed coup in 2002, Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” had become the greatest beacon of hope for leftists around the world. Hopes have risen further with President Chávez’s increasingly socialist rhetoric and the expansion of Venezuela’s social programs, fueled by breathtaking economic growth in the country’s nationalized oil industry. Venezuela is moving.
Only, it is far from clear where Venezuela is going. Many millions of people have pinned their hopes on the Bolivarian Revolution, but they are not all hoping in the same direction. Meanwhile the right-wing opposition to Chávez is weak but persistent. The right’s boycott of recent parliamentary elections shows that the “oligarchs,” as Chávez likes to call them, may still have a few tricks up their sleeve. Revolutionary optimists have called this an act of suicide by the right, ushering in a new phase of the revolution, now that Chavistas control every seat in the national assembly. But right-wingers always know how to spoil a party, and few Chavistas’ could conceal their unease at their eerily easy victory. For good reason-the course of the Bolivarian Revolution is still less clear now than it was before the elections.
I don’t intend to predict the future. But I will reflect on the conditions of possibility for the Revolution’s success. What will it take for the “revolutionary process” to fulfill its promises, promises which grow more radical every day? What will it take to realize the hopes that have been placed in the Bolivarian Revolution, when we know that not all of these conflicting and ever-changing hopes can be realized?
Hugo Chávez has declared his opposition to capitalism and support of socialism. When I was in Venezuela this past summer, most people agreed with him, even if they did not agree on what this might mean. Theories of socialism and social justice abound in Venezuela. Some Chavistas support the new social welfare programs, while hoping for an eventual reconciliation between the rich and the poor. Others call for struggle against the “oligarchs.” The country’s small but growing Trotskyist currents call for the expropriation of bourgeois property, while the larger Communist Party of Venezuela is more cautious, prepared for a very slow transition to socialism. Meanwhile the militant Tupamaros are prepared for armed self-defense of poor communities, and possibly for guerrilla war, if need be. It is quite unclear what Chávez himself envisions, partly because he lends his support to so many different ideas and strategies, and partly because his views seem to be changing fairly quickly.
Probably the most popular strategies for building socialism in Venezuela involve the principles of “endogenous development,” “co-management,” and “cooperativism.” The first term is broad, but among other things it lends legitimacy to the process of expropriating unused land and closed factories by workers and campesinos, as a means of increasing the economic potential and self-sufficiency of Venezuela. The term also refers to the country’s burgeoning cooperative movement, which in some ways has been filling in the economic gaps left by capitalism. In state-owned enterprises, “endogenous development” has involved an attempt to tie administration more closely to the interests of the nation, with autonomy from the dictates of international capital. In some enterprises “co-management” has been introduced, giving workers control over most internal affairs of the enterprise, while the state retains a stake in the enterprises’ profits and maintains some representation in administration.
None of these strategies involves a direct confrontation with established capital. In fact, for a long time it has been Chávez’s strategy to avoid such confrontation as much as possible. Even while the monopolistic corporate media blared the most extreme anti-Chávez propaganda, Chávez never advocated the popular expropriation of the means of mediatic production. Instead, he supported grass-roots attempts to establish independent media sources throughout the country. Similarly, many Venezuelans see the cooperative movement as an alternative to capitalism-one that is clearly superior, and which will continue to grow until it could become the dominant economic force in the country. More radical socialists are quick to point out the naďveté of this view, but it is also possible that Venezuela really is not yet prepared for direct confrontation-very few workers or campesinos have attempted to occupy factories or land that is currently being put to productive use by capitalists. A more important question is not “Will the Revolution be completed today?” or “Is Chávez really a socialist?” but “Is the Revolution moving forward?” The answer to the second question is a definitive yes. But this only raises more questions. Venezuela is moving, but it has a long way to go.
The election of Chávez was the impetus to significant popular mobilization in Venezuela. Many existing left organizations rallied to his cause, while poor communities began, slowly, to build organizations in support of the revolutionary “process” that the president heralded in the vaguest of terms. But at that time the “process” mostly involved attempts by the army and government agencies to implement social welfare programs-benefiting the poor, but not usually controlled by them. Then, in April 2002, came the attempted coup. If Chávez’s first election was kindling for a camp fire around which the Venezuelan population would gather, the coup was the spark the lit a wildfire. In the words of a woman I met in a Caracas neighborhood last summer, “The coup made us realize that we had to organize ourselves.”
zmag.org
As Argentina’s Debt Dwindles, President’s Power Steadily Grows
BUENOS AIRES, Dec. 30 – Just four years ago, Argentina’s economy was prostrate and its politics in chaos, after a financial crisis resulted in bank deposits being frozen, the government defaulting on more than $100 billion in debt and five presidents holding office in two weeks. But on Tuesday, the country is expected to pay off the last of its debt to the International Monetary Fund and simply walk away from further negotiations with the group.
Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press
President Néstor Kirchner announced that his country is expected to pay its $9.8 billion debt to the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday.
Forum: Unrest in South America
Argentina still owes tens of billions to private lenders, even after a debt restructuring in March. But the $9.8 billion payment is an important symbolic milestone and just one of several recent signs that President Néstor Kirchner appears to be concentrating more power in his own hands and steering his government to the left. Since a midterm election victory in October, Mr. Kirchner has also moved to establish an alliance with Venezuela’s populist leader, Hugo Chávez, and, as a traditional Peronist, to extend the hand of the state deeper into the economy, the judiciary and the news media.
“With this payment, we are interring a significant part of an ignominious past,” Mr. Kirchner said recently, adding that the action would liberate Argentina from a supervisory body that was making “more and more demands that contradict themselves and economic growth.” That position is popular here because many Argentines believe that the I.M.F. is responsible for the policies that led to the economic crisis of 2001, and then left the country to recuperate on its own.
Mr. Kirchner, 55, took office in May 2003 having won less than a quarter of the popular vote. But he has erased memories of the crisis of 2001 and early 2002 and now enjoys record levels of public support – 75 percent or more, according to recent polls – that allow him to do largely as he pleases.